PolySciFi Blog

Saturday, August 25, 2007

More Data from the Lancet Oncology Study

Earlier this week, the Telegraph reported on cancer survival rates in Europe. Being a British paper, their primary concern was that the UK was pretty bad compared to the rest of Europe.

Reason, however, noticed that the authors had compared the US to Europe and we beat every country in overall 5-yr cancer survival (the point when for most cancers your said to be "cured").

This prompted various discussions around the blogosphere, such as this comment thead over on Dean's World (from where I took the graphic), among people not used to controlling inputs when measuring performance across systems (see life expectancy - an output metric which is a function of the process - i.e., the health care system - and the input -i.e., genetics & cultural factors).

Various folks were making assertions that the numbers were only that way because of the higher prevalence of skin cancer in the US skewing the aggregation and that France would've done much better. So, I downloaded the actual paper (Recent cancer survival in Europe: a 2000–02 period analysis of EUROCARE-4 data) and here’s the cancer by cancer breakdowns between the Euro-4 average (the countries listed in the original articles) and the US average (5 yr survival percentages) for all the cancers considered in the paper.